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17 Times Smaller than Rhode Island

Washington, D.C., June 26, 2020

To me, this is the LAST thing Congress should be focused on right now. I’m talking about legislation that would turn Washington, D.C. into our nation’s 51st state.

House Democrat Leadership has scheduled a vote on just such a measure today. I’ll be a hard NO vote, but by the time you read this, the liberal majority will have passed the bill in the House, even though it’s highly unlikely to be considered in the Senate.

For those who are interested, here are the details on this effort:

The District of Columbia is just over 68 square miles. By comparison, Rhode Island, the smallest state in the country, is approximately 1,212 square miles. Our Founding Fathers intentionally wanted Washington, D.C. to be a district, NOT a state. In fact, they carefully crafted the Constitution so the seat of our federal government would not be located in (and therefore possibly partial to) any one state. That was smart.

This bill, H.R. 51, would not turn all of D.C. into a state. According to the legislation, “the principal Federal monuments, the White House, the Capitol Building, the Supreme Court Building, and the Federal executive, legislative, and judicial office buildings located adjacent to the Mall and the Capitol Building” would remain in the District of Columbia, while the rest of it would be jettisoned into its own little state called the “Washington, Douglass Commonwealth.”

*** And this tiny new state, with a population less than Charlotte, NC and 17x smaller than Rhode Island, would be entitled to TWO new U.S. Senators.

I realize there are people who live inside the District of Columbia. And in terms of representation in Congress, they are not represented by Senators or Representatives like we are here in South Carolina. (D.C. does have a non-voting Representative in the House, which would become voting if this bill were to become law.)

But the RIGHT WAY to address the issue of representation for those who live within the District of Columbia is to simply cede the land that’s not part of the federal enclave – in other words, cede everything except what was described above – back to Maryland.

That’s the way to handle it! You don’t create a new micro-state with a relatively small number of people and give it the same voting power in the Senate as the other 50 states.

Here's the underlying truth: the REAL reason Democrats in Congress want this is not because of some newly found sense of fairness.  Instead, it's because those who live in D.C. vote OVERWHELMINGLY Democratic, and would certainly send two additional "progressives" liberals to the Senate if this effort is successful. If those same voters had a propensity to elect Republicans, this endeavor wouldn't even be on the radar.  

Which means it's nothing more than a liberal power grab.